8 
LAND & WATER 
April 6, 1 01 6 
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I 
was noted during Saturday. These concentrations have 
not been rapidly effected by the enemy dining the 
last stages of the great struggle round Verdun. They 
have got slower and slower because the expenditure of 
men has gone far beyond the original calculation, so that 
the filling up of gaps or the use of fresh units has become 
in every case a more difficult business than it was. 
In the night between the Saturday and Sunday, the 
first and the second of April, the French abandoned all 
the ground between the northern slopes and the brook of 
Forges in the valley, which marshy little watercourse 
runs directly from Haucourt to Bethincourt. (It is the 
northern fork or source of the stream, the southern runs 
into Bethincourt from the valley between Hill 304 and 
the Mort Homme.) 
All day Sunday and all the follow ing night the Germans 
delivered an intensi\e bombardment over all the aban- 
doned area, believing it to be still occupied, and on the 
Monday noon they threw a couple of brigades forward to 
carry what thej' still believed to be positions held by the 
Ftench. They were caught there by an enfilading fire 
from their left as well as by the fire in front of them from 
beyond the brook, and paid a very heavy toll indeed. 
Such are the fortunes of the Bethincourt salient up to 
the last news received at the moment of writing. 
The Proportionate Losses 
Let us take this particular set of actions upon the 
narrow front between Avocourt and Bethincourt and 
study the object of the enemy and the price he has been 
made to pay in this short time not for obtaining but for 
merely preparing to attain that object. 
It is perfectly clear that efforts of this sort involving a 
loss of anything from 10 to 20 thousand men with a local 
advance of anything from a mile to a quarter of a mile, 
at a distance of 10 miles from Verdun itself and a 
mere scratch upon the surface of the general salient of 
Verdun, are not undertaken with the mere object of 
occupying such little patches of territ(jry. To understand 
what the enemy is doing here, we must carefully look at 
the contours. 
Over against the Mort Homme, at a range of about 2,500 
yards, is a height called Hill 304. If the enemy can get 
on to this fiat-topped hill Mort Homme is turned and is 
untenable. If Mort Homme is turned and is untenable 
there is no good defensive, as we have seen, tmtil the 
main position is reached four or five miles behind. 
But Hill 304 is very steep upon every side except the 
west. It juts out like a sort of ])eninsula boldly from 
the plateau. Therefore the (ierman effort is to take it 
from the easier contours of the western side. The wood 
at A gives them cover j ust as did the Crows' Wood against 
the Mort Homrne at the other side. Hence their violent 
effort to occupy the whole of it some ten days ago, and 
hence the French counter-attack last Wednesday, which 
recovered all that part of the mood which climbs the first 
rise of the hill. That is where the Germans had put u|i 
their redoubt which the F"rench recaptured. The attack 
to carry Malancourt and Haucourt is of exactly the same 
nature. It is preparatory to pushing up the slopes along the 
arrow E, getting the French out of the horn of the wood 
that they occuj^y and going up both from E and from A 
to carrv Hill 304. The real effort, therefore, to turn the 
^lort Homme has not yet begun. Only the foundation 
for it has been laid. 
Now the whole interest of these various efforts lies for 
us in the proportion of loss sustained compared with the 
result achieved. One might reiterate that truth fifty times 
and not make it too emphatic. It is the one thing which 
gives the fighting in front of Verdun all its meaning. 
And to show the reader what that meaning is let me give 
a couple of examples in detail. 
The French held Malancourt and Haucourt, the hamlet 
next to it, with one battalion — to take that particular 
case. Tiiat is, they were here prepared, not to sacrifice 
in its entirety, but to suffer very heavy losses in, a 
unit which, even at its full establishment (which it certain- 
ly had not after the first days of fighting) would have 
numbered but a thousand men. Against this defensive, 
within the ruins of Malancourt and Haucourt, the enemy 
. launched forced difficult to estimate upon so small a 
front and coming over such open ground, but not less than 
about twelve times as numerous as the forces of the defen- 
sive. W'e know under what conditions they attacked— 
their double repulse, their sending for reinforcements, 
their final triple action through the night. We 
have recei\'ed from authoritative sources, and there 
has been printed, with full leave from the commanders in 
the l-'rench press, detailed accounts of what happened. 
And we are perfectly certain that before the Saturday 
morning was reached more than 12,000 and probably 
15,000 men had been flung into the massacre of that attack : 
an attack renewed over and over again in formation s) 
dense that it was in the nature of a swarm. The French were 
." firing into the brown " all the time. B\- Saturday 
